Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 38

Like flowers growing between the stars.

What were the places that mind could live? In a human nervous system. In the countless virtual gates of a quantum computer. And-and- But the dream-thought drifted away, a pattern that had blossomed and withered before she could grasp it.

She woke to find Gray McInnes at her bedside, frowning.

She said, idiotically, "Am I sick?"

(Because of course she was sick; that was why she heard voices....) But Gray shook his head rea.s.suringly. "Overtired, or so the therapist tells me. I guess you've beenunder a lot of stress. The wedding plans and all. What were you doing out in the wildwood?"

His expression was open and guileless, but she heard an accusation. "Just walking. Thinking."

He smiled. "The nervous bride?"

"Maybe some of that."

She turned her head. She was home, in her own shelter. They hadn't put her in the clinic, which was a good sign. Through the bedroom window she could see a patch of sky, clouds racing out of the west.

When those clouds broke against the flanks of the Copper Mountains there would surely be rain.

Summer was over.

Gray brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. His hand was gentle. He smelled warm and solid.

He was a big man, robust, stocky in the way that distinguished Earth-born colonists from their Martian or Kuiper-born colleagues. Chaia always felt tiny next to him.

He said, "The doctor gave you something. You'll probably want to sleep some more."

Chaia wondered whether it was Gray she loved or just his constant presence-the rea.s.surance of him, like a favorite chair or a familiar blanket. She dreaded hurting him.

But how could she go through with the wedding, when she was probably not even sane? How much longer could she pa.s.s among people and pretend to be normal? They would notice, soon enough; Gray would notice first, was perhaps even now in that first awful stage of discovery, the warmth of him hiding a kernel of repugnance....

"Close your eyes," he said, smoothing her forehead.

Cloud shadows stole across the room.

He stayed with her that night.

Humantown's particle-pair communications link with Earth had lately downloaded a series of fresh entertainments, and Gray picked one to watch while Chaia dimmed the ambient light. The videostory was called The American's Daughter and was set in the wild years of the twentieth century, when there were hundreds of quasi-independent Terrestrial nation-states and not even the moon had been settled. Gray, a history buff, pointed out some factual errors the producers had missed or ignored-the robotic servant that carried messages between the President's daughter and the penniless alchemy student was almost certainly an anachronism, for instance.

The story was placed in North America, with most of the conventional settings of an histoire americain: huge concrete buildings, pavement streets crowded with beggars and bankers, a cathedral, a "factory," a carnival. The story ended with a reunion, supposedly in New York City, but Chaia thought the buildings looked like the old city of Brussels, gently morphed to more closely resemble a twentieth-century city.

Gray turned to her curiously when she remarked on it. "What do you know about Brussels?"

"Well, I-" She was suddenly puzzled. "I guess I must have seen pictures."

Brussels.

A place on Earth.

But it had seemed so familiar. She just...well, recognized it.

Remembered it.

When had she seen Brussels? Can you remember a place you've never been? Or was this another neurological tic, like seeing spiders turn into people, like hearing jawbones talk?

Chaia's mood darkened. Gray stayed with her, and she was grateful for his company. But when they went to bed she turned her back to him, nestled against his big body in a way that meant she was ready to sleep. Only sleep. Or try to sleep.

Soon he was snoring. Chaia, restless, opened her eyes and watched the pebble-sized moon dart across the sky beyond the window. She thought of "lunacy," an old English word that had figured in The American's Daughter. After "Luna," the Earth's moon, linked in ancient mythology to madness, strangeness, the uncertainties of great distances and time.

Isis was a stepping stone to the stars.Star travel was not a simple business even today. Interstellar launches were more efficient than the original Higgs translations of two hundred years ago, but they still consumed enormous resources-in the energy and materials necessary to produce the exotic-matter Higgs lenses; and in sheer real estate, each launch requiring the conversion to its nascent energy of an entire small asteroid or Kuiper body. And all of that would take you no farther than the nearest thousand stars.

But from Isis, a living world at the periphery of the human diaspora, a thousand new stars became (at least theoretically) accessible. Isis didn't have the industrial base to support even a single outward-bound Higgs launch, not yet, but the time would come. Already self-reproducing Turing factories had colonized the icy fringes of the Isian system, building planetary interferometers to scout likely stars. Already, remensors and industrial robots had begun digging into selected cometary bodies, hollowing them out for the Higgs launches that would happen, if all went well, in fifty or a hundred years. Chaia herself might well live another hundred or two hundred years; she might see some of these great public works come to fruition.

In the meantime the daily work of Humantown went on: tending robots, harvesting food and medicinals from the wilderness, writing and revising Turing protocols, making sense of the strange Isian bios. And the simple work of living. Making love, making babies; growing up, even dying.

Getting married.

In the morning she went to the Universalist chapel with Gray for a brief rehearsal: essentially a walk up the aisle, a feigned exchange of yubiwa (finger rings made of gold mined from the mountains by robots), the p.r.o.nunciation of the banns. Weddings were a Terrestrial custom; relations among Martians and Kuiper folk were more fluid, less formal. Not that a Universalist ceremony was exactly formal.

Universalism was not even really a religion in the old sense. Its only dogma was a prescribed humility in the face of the mysteries of the natural world, the unfathomables of ultimate beginning and ultimate end.

Its icon was a black circle: the abyss, the primordial singularity; the infinitely receding s.p.a.cetime of a black hole.

Chaia walked listlessly through the rehearsal. She noticed, but could not bring herself to care, when Gray exchanged glances with Rector Gooding, their expressions reflecting-what? Disappointment?

Doubt? Had she been too restrained, too distant? Maybe it would be better if Gray came to doubt her sincerity. Then maybe he could set aside the quest that had consumed him for almost twenty years: to recreate and remarry the woman he had married once on Earth, the other Chaia Martine, her old shadow-self.

After the rehearsal she pled fatigue and left Gray at the chapel. She would go home and rest, she said. A lie. Instead she went to see Werner Eastman, determined to confront the mystery of her madness before she married Gray McInnes and perhaps widowed him again, a fate he hardly deserved.

"How much do you know about the first Isian colonists?" Werner asked, sipping coffee from a s.h.i.+ny blue mug.

He wasn't at the tunnel excavation today. He was in his laboratory in the medical-biological complex, a large s.p.a.ce strewn with Isian bones and fossils, insects killed and mounted on card stock, loose terminal scrolls with cladistic charts sketched onto them. There was another human skull section on the table in front of him. Chaia carefully avoided looking at it, lest it call her name.

"Not much," she said. "Just what you learn in school. They weren't hardened against the bios. They died."

"More or less correct. Did you know one of the original research stations was located just west of here? The ruins were cleared for farmland thirty years ago-the old hands wanted to preserve it as a historical site, but we were outvoted. We saved what we could from the antique data-storage systems, however, anything that hadn't been hopelessly corrupted by weather and time."

"Do you know who that is?" Chaia asked, meaning the skull fragment that lingered in her peripheral vision like a warning sign.

"I think so," Werner said. He sounded pleased with himself at this bit of detective work-he had obviously been ransacking the archives. "I think what we have here are the remains of a young Terrestrialwoman named Zoe Fisher."

Chaia didn't recognize the name, though perhaps she had heard it once long ago-it seemed familiar in that faraway fas.h.i.+on.

"Zoe Fisher," Werner continued, "was out in the wild-wood testing new isolation and immune-enhancement technologies when the research station lost its perimeters and went hot. She missed the evacuation. She was abandoned on Isis, captured by the local diggers and carried into their warren, where she died and was presumably devoured."

The diggers didn't like fresh meat. They preferred their victuals predigested by decay enzymes.

Ghastly, Chaia thought. She imagined, far too vividly, that early explorer, Zoe Fisher, lost in the woods with no hope of rescue, the toxic bios slowly but certainly eroding her defenses.

(Had it been raining back then? It was raining today: gently, on Humantown, and fiercely, far up the foothills of the Copper Mountains. The first explorers had never even felt the touch of Isian rain on their skin. Without their barriers of steel and latex and smartgels they had been horribly vulnerable; a single drop of rain contained enough Isian disease vectors to kill one of them literally within minutes.) She thought of Zoe Fisher, lost in the rain, dragged unwilling into the deep and foul complexities of the digger tunnels. The picture was almost too vivid in her mind, too painfully close.

"An awful way to die," Chaia said.

"She was delirious at the end. In a way, almost happy."

Delirious, Chaia thought. Like me. "How do you know that?"

"She was in sporadic radio contact with another colonist. Some fragments of her dialogue were stored to local cybers.p.a.ce and recovered when we archived the ruins. Zoe Fisher thought the bios of the planet had somehow entered her mind-that is, she believed she was talking to Isis itself. And not just Isis. All the living worlds of the galaxy, linked by some kind of shadowy quantum connection on the cellular level."

Chaia was startled.

The bios, she thought. The voice of the forest. Had the voice of the forest spoken to Zoe Fisher, down there in the darkness of the digger middens?

She said carefully, "Could there be any truth to that?"

Werner smiled. "I doubt it. We have some evidence that DNA-based life spread through the galaxy in a slow panspermia-at least that's the prevailing theory. But as far as we know, the only objects that can communicate at greater than relativistic speed are highly-engineered particle-pair links. Certainly not microscopic unicells."

She had dreamed, had she not, of the way a mind grows out of the chemically-charged s.p.a.ces between neurons? Well, how else might a mind grow? In the bios of a planet? In the stew of virtual particles seething in the vacuum between the stars?

"But it's possible," she whispered, "isn't it?"

"Well, no, probably not. Zoe Fisher wasn't a biologist or a physicist, and she wasn't exactly presenting a scientific thesis. But she was an orphan, and she talked about Earth as an 'orphan planet,'

cut off somewhere from the galactic bios. Essentially, she was talking about herself. She imagined she'd found the family she'd never had, even if it was a family of inconceivably vast intelligences."

But that's glib, Chaia thought. That's not the whole story. It can't be.

Nor was any of this the reason she had come to see Werner Eastman. He sat patiently, sharing the room with her, waiting for her to speak. The silence grew weighty until at last she confessed: "I'm worried about Gray. What I might be doing to him."

Werner's expression softened. He became a kind of father again, and she felt unbearably young and unbearably lonely next to him. "Chaia," he said. "Maybe you should be worried about yourself."

"No...it's Gray." She pictured Gray the way she had seen him last night, curled in bed, vulnerable for all his husky size. "He lost me once...."

"Chaia, that's not true. I know Gray sees it that way. The Chaia Martine you used to be... the woman who almost died in the river...Gray loved her deeply. He's never abandoned the hope that some part of her would resurface in you. But that's simply not going to happen. You're what that ChaiaMartine might have been, if she had been born and raised on Isis. That's all, and it ought to be enough. If he loved you on that basis, I would bless the marriage. But what moves Gray is a combination of loss and guilt. He misses his wife, and he blames himself because he couldn't save her from the river. He thinks he should have been out there with her in that awful storm, tying down beacon pylons. Well, he can't go back and rescue her. So he's doing the next best thing. He's marrying the woman he will always think of, on some level, as Chaia's ghost."

"No one has ever been nicer to me than Gray."

"And he'll go on being nice to you, year after year, and concealing his disappointment, year after year. And you deserve better than that."

Maybe. But Werner had failed to grasp the subtlety, the nuance of her relations.h.i.+p with Gray. I am not a diagram, she thought. I'm not one of your cladistic charts.

"I think my memory's coming back," she said, surprising herself.

"Pardon me?"

"My memory of Earth. Of being that other Chaia Martine."

Gray shook his head sadly. "It can't happen, Chaia. It's even less plausible than the idea of talking planets."

"I saw Brussels in a videostory last night. And I recognized it. Not, you know, from a photograph or a book. I knew I'd been there. I had walked those streets."

"Brussels? On Earth?"

It sounded ridiculous-another delusion-but she blushed and nodded.

"Chaia, that couldn't be a genuine memory."

"Why not?"

"I was one of your therapists, remember? You ought to read your own file more closely. Chaia Martine was born and lived in Brisbane. She was educated in the Emigre Academy in Near Earth Orbit from the age of ten, then traveled to the Kuper Belt for pre-Isian training. She couldn't have seen Brussels because she was never there."

An Isian day is slightly longer than the Terrestrial day. The circadian rhythms of the colonists had been adjusted to suit. Still, something in the ancient human biology took notice of the discrepancy.

Afternoons were long; nights could be endless.

Chaia went to bed alone, far later than she had planned. Her head was throbbing. A thousand half-formed ideas flickered through her mind. She fell asleep almost inadvertently, between one fevered notion and the next.

A rattle of thunder woke her deep in the belly of the night.

Storms came hard out of the west this time of year, rolling over the basinlands toward the spine of the continent. Wind whispered around the facets of her personal shelter.

You ought to read your own file more closely, Werner had said. But she never had, had she? She had explicitly avoided learning very much about the Chaia Martine who had once inhabited this body, the Terrestrial woman who had married Gray McInnes once long ago... not because she was incurious but because that woman was dead, and it was better, her therapists had insisted, not to disturb her ghost, not to confuse the issue of her own fragile ident.i.ty.

But perhaps some ghosts needed disturbing.

Sleepless, Chaia took her personal scroll into her lap and addressed the Humantown archives.

She had been trained in archival management and it was simple enough for her to scroll into the medical and personnel records and root out Chaia Martine's detailed curriculum vitae. Chaia Martine- that Chaia Martine-had been groomed from birth for Isis duty. Biologically, she was the daughter of a Catalonian peasant couple who bartered a half-dozen viable embryos to the State Service in exchange for tax relief. She had been decanted in Brisbane and educated under the Colonial Necessities Act; her specialty had been agricultural genning and management, a skill lost to her now. She had met and married the young Gray McInnes at the orbital Emigre Academy.

And she had never been to Brussels.Could there have been an unscheduled or unrecorded vacation? Well, perhaps so; but she doubted it. The State Service kept excellent records, especially in the case of a duty ward like Chaia Martine. If Chaia Martine had seen Brussels without registering the journey in her daily records, it represented a triumph of intrigue.

But Chaia Martine was n.o.body's rebel. She gave every evidence of being happy in her work. The prospect of traveling to Isis had apparently pleased her enormously. As had her marriage to Gray McInnes.

Then had come the Higgs translation, her first year on the planet, the terrible storm, her stupid heroism, las.h.i.+ng beacon pylons against the wind when the robots were disabled, and inevitably suffering for it-dying for it, essentially, when her skull was split and (according to the medical record) "large portions of the left and right parietal and occipital lobes were completely obliterated, with attendant ma.s.sive blood loss and the penetration of untreated river water through the pontine and lumbar cisterns."

They could have let her body die, but enough of Chaia Martine remained intact that triage protocols dictated a cerebral rebuild. And thus the new Chaia Martine was born. With Gray McInnes, no doubt, weeping at her bedside.

Gray had avoided her a.s.siduously for the first twelve years of her new life, because she had been, neurologically, a child-maturing in her adult body more rapidly than any normal child, but a child nevertheless. But he had remained loyal to her.

A loyalty born of guilt and grief, if Werner Eastman was to be believed.

But Gray loves me, Chaia thought. She had seen it a thousand times, in the way he looked at her, the way he held her. A love complete and forgiving and therefore terrible in its weight.